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Meanderings

The tub was filled with ice, the kind from those clear bags stuffed in the freezer out front of a gas station. Sometimes the freezer is inside, but most times it's out front.

And when he put the ice into the tub, he put it in first, before the water. That way, the porcelain of the tub gets cold first, on the bottom, and in turn will - who gives a shit.

The words haven't come around too often as of late. I think it's because my mind is elsewhere. Vacant. Sign turned around in the window. CLOSED. Or out to lunch or gone fishing. I've not returned to the shop to flip that sign back around, to knock the dirt out the mat, to dust the shelves off or clean the counters. The shop has aged and sagged. Like all things in life tend to do, after awhile.

Sometimes in line at Pretzel Time I wonder aloud if the cheese is worth the expense. You know, the dipping cheese. It seems to always be a little underwhelming, a little chewy. Can cheese go stale? I don't know. I think it just curds. Cheese curds. It's both a noun and a verb.

The last of the remaining light splashed onto the side of the long sedan as the grayness enveloped the street. The mist rolled in like the relatives during the holidays, unwanted and entirely too early. Jimmy forgot about his 9:30, he went straight to his 10.

The radio played the same jingle it played every day, the one that brought all the boys to the park. Oh, I meant milkshake, not jingle.

'To be or not to be' is such a sea-sawey way to go through life, isn't it.

Sometimes when people ask why my right leg is bowed out and my left one isn't, I tell 'em that when I was young my brother jumped off the teeter-totter when he was on the bottom and I came crashing down, snapping my leg like a twig. That usually gets 'em sorry-faced pretty quick-like.

We used to play legos and beg my Dad to bring us to Rated R films. Wellp, one day we begged him to bring us to Robocop 2, and he said yes, so we stopped playing legos and went. Wellp, we left that movie soon after it started because it was just very course an earned its R-rating in the first few minutes, and then afterwards when we got home he wouldn't let us play legos anymore that day. It was a real win-lose-lose.

One day back when I was younger than I am right now I saw a kid dressed up as a clown and hanging out underneath our little cul-de-sac's street light He'd stand really still and look from side to side slowly. Actually, I don't know if it was a kid at all. He coulda be a real clown that was lost and needed some help maybe. But his face sure didn't look like it. He seemed like he knew exactly what he was doing, and that was, of course, scarring me forever.

'It takes a lot of guts to do what you did,' says a the first guy. 'Aw, it wasn't nothing,' says the second, clearly knowing that he did, in fact, possess those guts that the first guy referred. Sometimes, in the face of adversity, you've either got to stand and fight or lay down and die, and the second guy knew that he did the right thing by blowing the first guy's mother away before she turned into a zombie.

The most real camaraderie in all of the living world is the camaraderie between all those people that don't achieve their dreams that blab about it for the rest of their lives.

People always describe tough situations as 'lose-lose', when in actuality, it's probably more like 'lose-lose-lose,' because they forget that we all die in the very, very end, too.

Man, that last one was depressing. But not as depressing as the time our family's cocker spaniel got hit by a car, and then for a full year afterwards, I would pretend anybody I hated was the person that hit her..

You always knew how bad it was to stick up that middle finger by itself, didn't you? Oh man, I would go into the bathroom and stick it up at myself and then think I was going to Hell for doing it. I still do it, but now I know I'm going to Hell, but for a lot of other different stuff.